Hope Hicks’s White Lies and Smizing Eyes

If you are going to tell Congress that working as the communications director for the Trump White House involved telling only “white lies,” you’d better come with your game face on.

Photography by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

It is often mentioned that Hope Hicks, the departing White House
communications director, used to model, a fact that seems of little
relevance to her political life. But it does perhaps help to explain the
photo of Hicks, taken by Chip Somodevilla, of Getty, that has been
circulating since Tuesday. Arriving at the Capitol to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, Hicks, dressed in a wide-lapel navy-blue
coat, turned her contoured
face toward the camera and gave a perfect, ten-out-of-ten smize.
“Smizing”—smiling with your eyes—is a neologism that Tyra Banks, the
host of “America’s Next Top Model,”
coined to teach the
show’s contestants how to hold a viewer’s attention. To smile without
smizing is merely to gesture emptily toward an expression, like a school
kid holding a grin for a class picture, or a politician who has already
shaken fifty hands and must now shake a fifty-first. But to smize
without smiling is to create a frisson of mystery, a hint of some secret
mental calculus at work behind the mask of the face.

This is harder than it seems. Smizing takes skill. Try it out in your
bathroom mirror: you will likely do too much and wind up with crazy eyes
(crize?), or do so little that the change is imperceptible. Mona Lisa
smizes. The young woman in Vermeer’s “Portrait of a Young
Woman”
smizes. And, walking into what turned out to be a nine-hour session of
questioning about what she may or may not have known regarding Russia’s
attempts to influence the 2016 election, Hicks smized as if her life
depended on it—which, to some extent, it did. If you are going to tell
Congress that working as the communications director for the Trump White
House involves telling only “white lies,” you’d better come with your
game face on.

Or could there be something more to Hicks’s expression, a certain demure
acknowledgment that she has finally wound up as the focus of all those
camera flashes? During her tenure on Team Trump, Hicks has made a point
of avoiding the spotlight. This has involved some bizarre contortions.
When the reporter Olivia Nuzzi
profiled her for GQ,
in 2016, Hicks, then the Trump campaign’s press secretary,
declined to be interviewed but opted to sit in the room as Nuzzi
interviewed Trump about her. As photogenic as she is, she has tended
to appear in the background of White House images—a wise choice, when
your boss is a megalomaniac. (There are exceptions. Last fall, at a
state dinner in Japan, Hicks made
headlines by
appearing in a black tuxedo and floppy bow tie, like a Bond girl in
Marlene Dietrich drag, upstaging even the First Lady.) Hicks has earned
a reputation as a gifted Trump-whisperer, placating the President while
resolutely stonewalling the rest of us; never has a White House
communications director been so uncommunicative with the public. But her
image as an enigmatic, sober figure in a fun house of buffoons has been
crucial to her work, and to her success. It is easy to underestimate a
young, attractive woman in a position of great responsibility, to see
her as a pawn rather than a player on her own terms.

Recently, though, Hicks has been pulled toward the center of attention.
She helped draft a statement defending Rob Porter, the former White
House staff secretary accused of domestic abuse, with whom Hicks has
apparently had a romantic relationship. (Porter has denied the abuse
allegations.) And now she has been drawn into the Mueller investigation.
In January, the Times reported, Hicks swore that e-mails written
by Donald Trump, Jr., regarding his meeting during the election with
Russian operatives “will never get out,” raising the question of whether
she might obstruct justice. Maybe in this Bond film she’s a villain
after all: White Lie, a silent but deadly deflector of the truth.

A day after her congressional testimony, Hicks informed the President of
her intention to resign from her post. In light of this sudden turn of
events, Hicks’s smize seems to suggest a certain degree of jubilance at
the knowledge that soon she would be gone from Washington. She was a
high-powered P.R. flack who ran away to join the circus, and now she
wanted to go home again. On the other hand, it has been reported that
Trump, furious with Hicks for admitting that she had fudged on his
behalf, pressured her to go. Once, her ignorance counted as a
qualification. “I said, ‘What do you know about politics?’ ” Trump
boasted, in late 2016, recalling the moment he hired Hicks. “She said,
‘Absolutely nothing.’ I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re into the world of
politics.’ ” Now she knows too much, but, whatever it is, she isn’t
telling—yet.